Animation Studies – Vol.3, 2008 Laura Ivins-Hulley The Ontology of Performance in Stop Animation Kawamoto’s House of Flame and Švankmajer’s The Fall of the House of Usher Judy clubs Punch with a mallet. Jack the Pumpkin King decides to take Santa’s place one Christmas. Gumby foils the Blockheads’ plans, yet again. In each of these cases, we as the audience focus our attention on the moving figures, finding pleasure in the characters and stories. Yet, though we focus our imaginative attention upon Jack dancing through Halloweentown, we are always aware of the animator and the fact that these engrossing figures are inanimate objects. So who is the performer? When we discuss performance in an animated film, are we talking about the animated figure? The animator? Do films without anthropomorphized characters contain performances? In live action films, it is quite easy to center a discussion of cinematic performance on the actor and never feel compelled to consider the role the audience plays in co- creating the performance. I do not mean to suggest that film spectatorship is not a wide and rich field, but that very often when assessing “performance,” we specifically refer to actors and dancers. However, since the animated figure does not move itself, the nature of performance becomes more complicated. In the animated film, we must take the audience into consideration to determine how performance is constituted. Through a juxtaposition of two stop animated films - Kihachiro Kawamoto’s House of Flame (Kataku; 1979) and Jan Švankmajer’s The Fall of the House of Usher (Zánik domu Usheru; 1981) - I will explore the ontology of the puppet animation performance, especially as it relates to the audience’s understanding of the figure as character. I chose to focus on these films for a few reasons. Firstly, both animators draw techniques and inspiration from stage puppetry, a medium whose performance has been examined extensively, and in fact, we shall see that scholarly writings on stage puppetry and puppet animation share many premises. Additionally, both Kawamoto’s and Švankmajer’s films are narrative shorts that adapt stories familiar to many in their audience. Despite these similarities, though, House of Flame and The Fall of the House of Usher differ in ways that make for useful juxtaposition. In House of Flame, Kawamoto visually renders the story through humanesque puppets - that is, puppets with bodies and faces made to represent human figures, though these figures are highly stylized. While on the other hand, Švankmajer retells Poe’s story through the performance of objects and spaces, omitting human figures altogether. Defining “Performance” However, before delving into our study, we should begin with a preliminary definition of the term “performance.” First, performance theorist Richard Bauman conceives verbal performance in terms of “responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence” (1984, p. 11). So for him, to perform is to perform for someone, someone who recognizes the performance to be such and might possibly pass judgment as to its competence. Further, Deborah Kapchan writes: “To perform is to carry something into effect - whether it be a story, an identity, an artistic artifact, a historical memory, or an ethnography” (1995, p. 479). The important idea here is this “carrying into effect,” that performance is an action in the process of realization. Dell Hymes would call this “emergence,” a term he uses to distinguish between “everyday behavior” and actions recognized as performances (Hymes, 1975). Emergence combines the carrying into effect 60 Animation Studies – Vol.3, 2008 of the performance with responsibility to an audience, occurring precisely when the performer and audience come together to co-create meaning. For the cinema, this means emergence occurs when the film and audience are co-present, or in other words, when the film is projected. Further, films “key” (to borrow a term from Erving Goffman) fictional performance in a number of different ways. First, the opening titles often contain cast-members’ names, cueing us into the fact that the people in the story are characters played by people whose “real names” (and thus “real identities”) are altogether different. For example, when we see Robert DeNiro’s name in the credits of Taxi Driver, we know the character he plays, Travis, does not represent DeNiro in his everyday life.1 Secondly, fictional films often share certain formal properties that indicate to the audience that they are not documentaries, especially in Western filmmaking. These properties include tightly edited shot-reverse-shot sequences, the filmic subjects’ apparent unawareness of the camera, and predetermined narrative trajectories.2 Finally, extra-filmic features frame the onscreen performance as such. With rare exception, the audience is informed “what kind of film” they are going to see before they even walk into the theater or rent the DVD. Movie posters, television advertisements, and conversations with friends tell us the genre of a movie, and as long as the film originates within a familiar culture, we will be familiar with the genre tradition the film is in dialogue with. For example, a television advertisement for the latest Wes Craven film might proclaim, “‘The scariest villain since Freddy Kruger!’ says Rolling Stone.” By telling the audience the villain is scary and the film originates from Wes Craven (along with any number of visual cues contained within the ad), we can deduce it is part of the horror genre, and thus a performance constructed for audience enjoyment. For the animated film, this keying is even more pronounced because of the presence of the animated figure. We know if the character is hand-drawn, the action onscreen cannot be literal. We know the puppet is not actually alive, performing this dance. It is manipulated by a human to give it the appearance of literal action. In many forms of stop motion animation, we watch a three-dimensional object, so that the performance carries a paradoxical indexicality: the puppet tangibly exists outside the film, but its movement does not. House of Flame - Motivation and Embodiment Adapted from a Noh play entitled The Seeker’s Mound (Motomezuka; see Sharp, 2007), Kawamoto’s House of Flame tells the story of a male traveler in search of a mystical landmark called “the Seeker’s Mound.” During his search, he encounters a maiden who relates a tragic lovers’ tale that leads to a pious young woman’s imprisonment in a purgatory-esque house of flames. Though many elements of House of Flame will necessarily be specific to the cultural tradition within which Kawamoto worked - for example, the design of the puppets, the narration style, and the story itself - this short film provides an entry into examining the general nature of stop puppet animation. In this film, as in other stop animations, the puppets mark themselves as characters primarily through the apparent performance of motivated, expressive gestures. In one sequence, we watch the pious young maiden fret over her choice of suitors. She looks from the poet’s proclamation of love on the left to the warrior’s on the right, then brings a hand to her forehead, palm out, 1 Although, sometimes actors are cast for their real-life semblance to a character, blurring the lines between the identity of the actor and his character. 2 Of course, realizing these tendencies exist, many filmmakers have actively worked to complicate definitions of fiction and documentary. Films such as David Holzman’s Diary (Jim McBride, 1967) appropriate formal conventions of documentary into their fictional films, and Werner Herzog borrows techniques from fiction films to help achieve what he terms “ecstatic truth” within his documentaries. 61 Animation Studies – Vol.3, 2008 expressing her worry through that small gesture. When she tilts her head forward and covers her face with her hands, we recognize this movement as one of inner pain. Following bunraku and noh convention, Kawamoto frequently utilizes such minimalist movements, yet the movements his figures do make say a great deal. Moreover, gestures communicate something quite important to the viewer, though the viewer rarely consciously acknowledges it. This is that the animated character possesses agency. As Adam Kendon points out about bodily actions: “to the extent that they are thought not to be under voluntary control, they are not regarded as gesture” (1992, p. 179). So, when the pious young maiden brings the back of her hand to her forehead, we watch with the understanding that she intends to bring her hand to her face, thus facilitating the audience’s identification with her as a subject of the film. Moreover, wrapped up in this idea of agency is the complimentary notion of motivation. Movement theorist Rudolf Laban opens his book Mastery of Movement by writing: “Man moves in order to satisfy a need. He aims by his movement at something of value to him” (1971, p. 1). In other words, something motivates the action of the movement, whether that be a reaction to internal desire or external stimuli. Generally, we are adept at interpreting the motivations behind actions of others within our own culture because we share a code of movement. As part of creating and maintaining the illusion of a puppet’s life, a puppeteer demonstrates that the puppet shares in a code of movement, which often means dwelling on movements that are banal when performed by human subjects in their daily lives. As A.C. Scott writes in his book about bunraku theatre: “In everyday life, no one stops to think about the dramatic significance of his ordinary actions, but on the puppet stage they are important in providing an understanding of behavior” (1963, p. 80-81). The illusion of intention and motivation is the site where a consideration of acting becomes important.